Gemma Tipton: Space, the final frontier for life in a cottage

Does size matter? Yes, but not how you might think. In most houses you tend to find the main bedroom is the biggest. We seem to equate scale with status, and overall house sizes and bedrooms are no different. I frequently find, particularly in some of Ireland’s newer-build hotels, bedrooms larger than my entire house. In fairness, my house is very small indeed; it’s one of the Dublin Artisan Dwelling cottages, built in Dublin’s inner city at the turn of the last century to try to quell the tuberculosis that was rampant in the tenements. The 1911 census shows a family of six lived there, and that’s before someone built the bedroom extension.

Nevertheless, while I’d like a larger place – with an upstairs and a sea view, if anyone’s offering – I still don’t think I’d go for the football pitch-sized main bedroom with dressing room and en-suite arrangement into which you could probably fit another few dormitories. I like space, and I like room to put things in, but I happen also to like more intimate spaces for, well, intimacy. Small can be just as powerful as enormous.

Artists understand this. It can be a common misconception that minimalist work is small, but it’s actually often the opposite. The minimalist artists of the 1960s tended to work on a somatic scale – that is, a scale that reflects the size of the human body. This means, standing in front of a spare, possibly even blank canvas, or plain, smooth sculpture, you can, at a stretch, imagine yourself into its emptiness, like a meditation.

Small is another matter entirely, especially when used wisely. Most art students fall in love with the same man in their first year. It doesn't matter whether they're male or female, or even that he has been dead since 1962, they're actually falling in love with his book, The Poetics of Space.

Hugely influential, Gaston Bachelard sported a beard worthy of George Bernard Shaw, and the type of hair that you might expect from a French philosopher who also wrote on scientific subjects – including how science can be limited by our own patterns of thinking – but it is for The Poetics of Space, first published in French in 1958, that he is probably best known.

It’s not the kind of book you read from cover to cover, unless you’re due to take an exam on it, and some of the sentences are a little tortuous. But with chapters on wardrobes, corners, nests and “the phenomenology of roundness”, it’s also a series of unexpected delights. Without a house, he writes, “man would be a dispersed being. It maintains him through the storms of the heavens and through those of life”. With this he encapsulates the psychological as well as the physical depredations of homelessness.

Once your shelter is secure, the chief benefit of the house is, he claims, that it “shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”. It’s a beautiful thought, and from there flows the idea of how a house, and the furniture within, also inflect your dreaming. “Wardrobes,” he writes, “with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms, are veritable organs of the secret psychological life.”

Dipping in, almost 60 years after the book was first published, is like discovering a refreshing antidote to the cold narratives of the housing market, the property ladder and the race for taste. After I bought my house, at possibly the most inopportune time during the boom, well-intentioned friends gave me house- warming gifts of books on living in small spaces. Glossy and lavishly illustrated pages gave details of clever storage solutions, multitasking furniture, tricks with colour and the best way to create the illusion of space with mirrors. Not one featured a house as small as mine.

So, after all their advice, it was going back to Bachelard’s book that ultimately cheered me up. In his chapter on the miniature, he points out how both psychologists and philosophers have tended to ignore how frequently miniature houses (and worlds) turn up in fairy tales. Musing on a tiny object, he describes how we focus our attention, and that focus, being intensified by the smallness of its object, becomes all the stronger. “Thus the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world . . . Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.”

It’s probably a bit of a stretch to describe my house, smaller than the current minimum standards for new apartments (and don’t forget the family of six occupants 100 years ago), as a refuge of greatness, even though the thought is naturally seductive. What it does is remind me that those vast master bedrooms are someone else’s idea of comfort, and that even in the largest and grandest of houses most people end up hanging out in that small, cosy den, the one inevitably to be found just off the kitchen. The lofty drawing rooms are left out in the cold.